I thought I read the clue here, oh well. Somewhere still researching this issue I read a question about a flaky NFS server. As my NFS server is on a stock Fedora Core 5 box I decided to upgrade NFS (couldn’t hurt). There are not packages that I can find for NFS on Fedora Core 5 so I upgraded from source from something like 1.0.8 to 1.0.9. It doesn’t sound like a lot. Snow Leopard, both 10.6.2 and 10.6.3, must be doing something different or more restrictive than Leopard, 10.5. The home directories now work without error.
The world is a happier place for me today.
Mike